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The Mageia development team recently released the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Mageia 8 operating system, a major version promising better hardware support for AMD and NVIDIA systems.
The Mageia 8 Release Candidate comes six months after the first beta version and ships with a newer kernel from the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel by default, thus offering better support for recent hardware. Most importantly, this new development release paves the way to better support for AMD and NVIDIA systems.
To achieve that, the development team enabled the newer AMDGPU open-source graphics driver by default for AMD graphics cards based on the Southern Islands family, such as Cape Verde, Hainan, Oland, Pitcairn, and Tahiti, as well as Sea Islands family, including Bonaire, Hawaii, Kabini, Kaveri, and Mullins.
“We are now defaulting to the newer amdgpudriver instead of the older Radeon, and feedback, if it works properly or not on your hardware, would be helpful,” said Donald Stewart.
For NVIDIA GPUs, they’ve switched the NVIDIA graphics drivers to glvnd, the GL Vendor-Neutral Dispatch library, allowing Mesa apps to work on systems with the latest NVIDIA 460 driver series on the 64-bit images, along with the NVIDIA 390 driver series for older GPUs.
On top of that, users of older NVIDIA GPUs will be pleased to learn that when installing Mageia 8, the default installer will switch supported systems to the NVIDIA 390 where possible. If that’s not possible, the open-source nouveau driver will be used instead.
Under the hood, Mageia 8 RC ships with GNU C Library (glibc) 2.32, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 10.2.1, RPM 4.16.1.2, and PHP 8.0.2. KDE Plasma 5.20.4 is used as default desktop environment for the flagship edition, but the final release will probably ship with KDE Plasma 5.21.
The GNOME and Xfce editions feature the latest GNOME 3.38.3 and Xfce 4.16 desktop environments, and those who don’t like either of them can install the Cinnamon 4.8.3 and MATE 1.24 desktop environments from the software repositories.
If you want to give Mageia 8 an early test drive, you can download the Release Candidate images from the official website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, so don’t use it on a production machine. You can give feedback on AMD or NVIDIA support for Mageia 8 RC here.
Last updated 3 years ago
